Topsoil exhaustion and poisoning is global. Freshwater scarcity is much worse in China and the Subcontinent than in the USA. Antibiotic resistance is world-wide. Destruction of rainforests: likewise. Female literacy is declining in developing countries, despite more time spent in "school".
Climate change is an interesting example, because we are obviously making things worse for climate overall for centuries. However, our rate of improvement is dramatically increasing.
The other examples you provide are local. I don't think that everything is improving everywhere obviously, that would be ludicrous. But if you broaden your metrics a bit more fairly - gdp per capita globally, child mortality and life expectancy - our improvement is significant.
Every country has its own problems and no one is perfect. Yes, its getting improved as people are getting educated and development of rural areas is happening
The world is getting better in many measurable ways. Access to reliable food, clean water, medical treatment, education, opportunities for women, and many others is up across the world.
Of course that's cold comfort to the people in places that are still going downhill, or who are "getting better" but still pretty shit. And environmental catastrophe is an existential threat. So it's not all sunshine and lollipops. But I don't think it's reasonable to say we're sliding straight into the abyss, either.
"The world is getting worse" is a belief perpetuated by the media and repeated by many people to explain their own unhappiness. However, many important indicators show things are getting better globally https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health...
Yes thats what the article says. What I am others are saying is that that's not the whole story. The living conditions are not getting better for everyone in some important ways that means something for whether this can continue.
There is nothing new in the fact that globally the world is getting better but that primarily means the developing countries are getting better not the developed ones where the trend is either stagnating or seem to be reversing.
Of course the world is improving on metrics like "deaths by natural disasters". That's just a consequence of technologies and infrastructures improving over time, and charitable funding to developing nations that aren't corrupt to the point that the money just ends up with their politicians.
"Sure we're all getting better, just look at global food and safety" is as inanely pointless an argument as "of course nothing is getting better, just look at poverty and corruption" - both lie on opposite ends of the most obvious basic spectrum of human behavior. If all you're worried about is "will I be alive and breathing" then yes, by all means, you have an "optimistic" future.
The political and economic trends of major countries might seem insignificant in comparison, but the world takes its cues from first-world countries. The state and progress of things in first world countries are a pointer to where things are going to go in those nations once the lowest levels of Maslow's hierarchy are covered.
Every single person? Not exactly. What about farmers forced off their land for corporate interests? What about people working in the garbage dumps of Tijuana in Mexico [1]? I've actually lived in the "first world" (born there) and now have lived over a year in a developing country where most people (including myself) don't have "aircon", and whether technology has improved things is not as clearcut as you might think.
Yes, we have better health care and more products, but we also have more pollution, more meaningless jobs, weaker local communities (especially in the most developed parts of the world), and beautiful species are going extinct.
Actually, I think the standard of living, at least in the long-term and for the many future climate refugees, is not actually that much improved.
Things are always getting worse in some way or another, at the same time they get better in other ways. Lowering poverty doesn't change that we're doing irreversible damage to major ecosystems.
These are mostly international statistics, and a lot of the progress being made is first China and now Africa and India catching up with the west. And that's great.
In the United States, however, things have been going somewhat backwards since the mid 70's. The millennial generation is poorer than their parents were at the same age. Civil rights are beginning to get rolled back. The political situation is fraught.
There are also, as others have pointed out, a number of red flashing danger signs coming from the environment. The earth is limited, and we're treating it as if it's infinite.
So, from my point of view, here, the "world is getting worse" belief has some justification.
It's a global vs local problem. Globally, there's no question that the general state of things is improving. Of course, this is in general -- there are things that are getting worse globally as well.
However, in some parts of the world (such as, in my opinion, the US), things are going a bit backwards. If you live in such an area, it can be hard to see (and appreciate) the bigger picture.
It's easy (and popular) to be a pessimist but when I look at objective global data on decade+ time scales, the only rational conclusion is that things are generally getting better for more people in more places than ever before (data like global poverty, infant mortality, literacy, etc). That doesn't mean we don't still have a ways to go and it certainly doesn't mean that things aren't terrible for some people in some places at any given moment.
Addressing those things for those people in those places should certainly be a top priority but we shouldn't let that blind us to the broader reality that by most standardized, objective measures things are mostly getting better for more people more of the time.
Its defintely cynical. Yes, the world is improving in many ways. Poverty is getting pretty better, diseases are fairly easier to fight, and infanticide isn't a thing. However, its also clear that governments have seemingly no interest trying to fight climate change and a large amount of the world is going to be suffering from the consequences of that in the future.
Fair enough, and I appreciate the extra perspective.
I wouldn't deny that many of these things have improved. Very little actually gets worse in a literal sense (environmental issues and other negative externalities aside, though they are very relevant as well). The concern is that they tend to get marginally better when they should by all means be getting significantly better, because the lion's share of the benefits feed the ever-widening wealth gap.
Death by warfare is on the decline, poverty globally is decreasing, affluence is increasing, technology is rapidly improving, communications are knitting together all cultures and regions of the world in ways we can't fully appreciate even while it's happening. Compared to even two decades ago there are millions upon millions of people who are no longer in poverty. There are countries who have become part of the developed, 1st world. And there are more countries on the way. "Developing" isn't just a euphemism for 3rd world shit-hole, a lot of countries are on their way towards the same level of affluence and development as the G8/G20.
Certainly there are a lot of problems in the world, some of them unprecedented problems. But there's little cause to bemoan the increasing population of the Earth. Human civilization is becoming more and more capable of dealing with problems like poverty, famine, environmental degradation, and even global climate change, even as it adds more and more members to its family.
Topsoil exhaustion and poisoning is global. Freshwater scarcity is much worse in China and the Subcontinent than in the USA. Antibiotic resistance is world-wide. Destruction of rainforests: likewise. Female literacy is declining in developing countries, despite more time spent in "school".
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